A Pithy Observation

When a new rule is made and it is pleasing to people we call “conservatives,” our reaction tends to result in a prolonged discussion about how “our civil liberties are being eroded.” There is a prevailing sentiment that this should have been stopped and we have already gone too far, even if no one can identify anything they could do before that is now beyond their capacity.

When a new rule is made and it is pleasing to liberals, our tendency is to engage in very brief commentary about how we’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet. There is a prevailing sentiment that the new rule is an overture to something larger, worthless if it is not, and the ink should not even dry before work begins on Chapter Two.

We somehow don’t seem to be receptive to the simple idea that liberals stop us from doing things. Perhaps this is why liberals have succeeded in keeping us from doing so many things. Yanking our kids out of a failing public school district, buying a firearm for household defense, and don’t forget the endless list of activities that have been curtailed by threat of civil action as opposed to hard-firm-statute. Putting up a picture of a nice-looking woman in an office, Easter baskets in city hall, “Please Speak English” policies in cheesesteak restaurants, keeping our homes when the city wants to buy us out for a new Wal-Mart, the list is endless.

What’s this “Religious Right” stopped me from doing lately, again?

Wimpy

If man is a species, and a species evolves by adapting to the struggle for limited resources through natural selection, growing stronger through the confrontation of the exigencies of nature, I wonder if the process can work the other way. If we rely on technology or whatever-else have you, to remove the struggle from daily life, can the genetic traits we have accumulated, start disappear through a process of atrophy?

In theory, I see no reason why not. In practice, it would appear this process is much quicker than the creation of those traits in the first place.

Item!

Ninety-seven percent of IT professionals feel “traumatized” at their work.

According to a survey released this month by Dublin-based consulting firm SkillSoft, 97 percent of IT professionals feel traumatized by their daily work. Indeed, 80 percent of them get tense just thinking about going to the office.
:
What appears beyond doubt is that workplace stress has turned into an epidemic…work has become so psychologically demanding because we choose to make it that way.

Duh. The article goes on to point out that “hyperactivity is now a badge of honor.” I’d say that’s right on the mark. Working in IT shops for twenty years in a variety of different capacities, I’ve come to notice some of the most esteemed and celebrated and up-and-coming highly compensated professionals, are the ones who put the most energy into showing how much adrenaline they have. It has not escaped my notice that these seem to be the people who take the most time to solve simple problems. Or, if they can somehow take all this cosmetic adrenaline rush and channel it into a productive solution to a problem, they’ve made the day far less productive for those around them. When Bob’s trying to get the index rebuilt on the database, after all, nobody within forty yards of Bob can think about a damn thing other than the stinkin’ database.

In fact, personally, I question how a real IT shop can have “badges of honor.” That strikes me as a case of choosing to make the job more stressful. After all, you’re there to make things work, or you’re there to show yourself off trying to make things work. You can’t do both.

If you try, everyone else will suffer as they wait longer before the damn thing works. But oh, what a show you’ll put on for them, trying to make it work.

Ninety-seven percent “traumatized,” huh. I wonder if this is a language problem. Like if you’re an IT professional, and at least one day in a week you get that feeling where you really, really wish it was Saturday and you don’t want to go in, you have to put down in this survey that you’re “traumatized.” Gawd, I hope that’s the case. To drive through the asphalt jungle, over the very spot where, two centuries earlier, Daniel Boone had to wrestle bears and what-not, grabbing your quick Starbuck’s Caramel-Macchiatto, waltzing in to your air-conditioned fortress, filling out a status report or two, and then answering a quick survey to report that you’re “traumatized.” Yeesh.

In the Civil War, when men had to have their legs amputated without anesthetics, there was no way to stop the bleeding without the benefit of a red-hot iron skillet. My point? A hundred and forty-one years on, 97% of the people who have to answer e-mails about why-isn’t-this-network-printer-working, feel “traumatized.” Trouble?

Item!

An office worker has suffered injury from his boss’ potty-mouth language.

A TELSTRA worker traumatised by bad language in the office has won a compensation claim.

The man was treated for anxiety and depression after his bosses told him to get his “arse” and “bum” on a seat, a tribunal has heard.

Sivanadian Perananthasivam has been awarded medical expenses and workers’ compensation for almost three months off the job because of emotional distress.

He was upset and weepy, and then later suffered migraines and nightmares and had a fear of answering the phone after he was sworn at, intimidated and branded a disgrace to his work team, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal was told.

The abuse that helped trigger a psychiatric disorder included one superior telling him to “park your little arse in that chair”.

The bad language was part of the Australian vernacular and would not offend the ordinary worker, the hearing was told.

But Mr Perananthasivam was a religious teetotaller and non-smoker not used to casual cursing.

Mr Perananthasivam, of Sydney, felt bullied and racially abused at work before the incident, the tribunal heard.

He was working as a bid manager for Telstra during the showdown and had since been sacked.

Two managers, Steve King and Phillip Cornwell, apologised to Mr Perananthasivam after Telstra held an independent inquiry.

Tribunal senior member Josephine Kelly ruled that he had suffered a work-related injury.

She ordered Telstra to pay medical bills and compensate him for time off work between February 9 and May 3, 2004.

You know, my lifetime is like the blink of an eye, against the mural of human evolution. I know of no human trait that has been developed over a mere four-decade span, in the ongoing struggle of the species to survive in a competition for limited resources. If you were to lengthen that amount of time by a factor of, let’s say, a hundred, to four thousand years or so — I still can’t think of any natural strength we’ve developed over that timeframe, other than, perhaps, a nominal increase in the average man’s height.

And yet in a single generation, I appear to have witnessed the pain threshold of the office worker yanked to the floor like a whore’s drawers. Waah!

So because of that, I have the sense that the human species, and thus any species, is capable of creating a new weakness in a fraction of the time it takes to create a new strength. I do not know this for a fact and have no way of proving it. I simply haven’t been alive long enough to see us do something really cool…like walk upright, see in the dark, change the shape of our teeth, expand our skull cavities, etc. These things take thousands of years, maybe millions.

I’m no scientist, either. And the scientists don’t want to find out about this stuff. They’d much rather bellyache about how President Bush doesn’t believe in global warming.

But I suspect if they were to take the time to look into it, they’d find my theory of slow-strength-rapid-weakness holds true, or anyway, that there’s some merit to it. A weakness can appear in a single generation, maybe even less than that, if an environment fails to introduce a challenge, and thus motivate a specimen to overcome it. Strengths, on the other hand, come from said challenges. They come from natural selection, and they come from mutations that allow one line of a species to compete more efficiently for limited resources, against another species failing to sport the new mutation, thus doomed to die off. That, essentially, is what natural selection is, as it’s been described to me. And it takes a long time. Generations. Oodles of generations.

Here it is 2006, and some guy with an unpronounceable name suffers injury when he is told to sit his ass down in a chair.

Thirty years for the weakness, thirty THOUSAND years for the strength.

You realize the ramifications of my theory, don’t you, if it is indeed true? We’re living in the end times. Armageddon must surely follow such a widespread and rapid shedding of the traits that we have accumulated over nigh-on-unmeasurable amounts of time, to survive in the wilds. Furthermore, if you buy into the theory that the taming of these wilds is a mere illusion, genuine only insofar as it motivates us to weaken ourselves by living in them — and I do — the end of the world is all-the-more assured.

But hey, don’t worry. Just keep sipping that Soy Latte, feel traumatized about having to do a restore on that network folder you erased by mistake, and sue your boss for telling you to park your ass in a chair. Pussies.

Bush At 38

President Bush’s approval rating is at 38 percent, up 2 points from earlier this month.

Last month, his approval rating was at a record low. You heard a lot, lot, lot about his approval rating last month.

And now that it’s perked up again, you’ve heard about it even more, haven’t you. Why, your ears are bleeding from hearing about how high the President’s rating is. Suuuuuuuuurrrrreee they are………….

Cause And Effect

Below are two sequences of cause and effect. Neither can be completely proven, nor refuted. You may find one to be more credible than the other.

Think of it as an intelligence test.

1. The Supreme Court, from time to time, comes up with more excuses not to execute murderers. This leads to an increase not only in murder, but in other violent crimes as well.

2. The Republicans who are in charge of the government right now won’t do anything about global warming, and this leads to hurricanes.

Hmmm…

Well, That’s It For Me

I’m not sure how to put all this together and I damn sure don’t know how to hand out the credit for finding it. For introducing me to the thread the Rottweiler gets the credit, but for pointing out the redundancy, we have to give that one to DailyKOS member Wisper. Let us start from the beginning, proceed forward until we come to the end, then stop.

On April 27, KOS member CheChe had to write in with his tale of woe:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the Senate Republicans want to drain the treasury in order to give every American a $100 check. I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult – the rage and feelings of helplessnes were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words – nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, “Honey, I just don’t know – I don’t know what’s going on in this country anymore…”

When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, “Daddy” she said, “why are the Republicans doing this to the country?” Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

For once she had to comfort me and get me back on my feet. Sometimes I just think it’s too much, but seeing the strength in my young daughter’s voice helped me to get through.

Bottle-feeding newborns is like forcing them to smoke cigarettes.

Kinda gets ya right here, don’t it? Well, hold the phone there, because you don’t want to turn on the water works before the story’s told. Because after the “Spying On Ordinary Americans” scandal came to a head, CheChe had to put together another narrative about the awful mood the Republicans are creating in his household.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn’t understand why the President would be spying on everyone. “Even my Grandma?” she asked pitifully.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President has ordered a group of spies to collect information on every American. “And yes honey, even Grandma”, I was forced to say.

I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult – the rage and feelings of helplessnes were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words – nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, “Honey, I just don’t know – I don’t know what’s going on in this country anymore…”

When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, “Daddy” she said, “why are the Republicans doing this to the country?” Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

For once she had to comfort me and get me back on my feet. Sometimes I just think it’s too much, but seeing the strength in my young daughter’s voice helped me to get through.

Bottle-feeding newborns is like forcing them to smoke cigarettes.

Geez, the poor kid. She can’t even turn on the cartoons without…er, yes she can. Come to think of it, this is kind of weird. How old is this girl anyway?

Well, it just happened again…

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn’t understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. “Doesn�t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?” she asked pitifully.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. “Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn�t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush�s trip ahead of time just in case…�

I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult – the rage and feelings of helplessness were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words – nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, “Honey, I just don’t know – I don’t know what’s going on in this country anymore…”

When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, “Daddy” she said, “why are the Republicans doing this to the country?” Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

For once she had to comfort me and get me back on my feet. Sometimes I just think it’s too much, but seeing the strength in my young daughter’s voice helped me to get through.

Bottle-feeding newborns is like forcing them to smoke cigarettes.

Y’know what I think? I think the daughter is made up. And CheChe is Karl Rove.

Whoever he is, the folks here think he’s written the funniest DailyKOS comment in history. I’m inclined to disagree; the history over there is awfully rich. You can grow any crop you want over there, just don’t get any on the bottoms of your shoes.

If all this stuff is on the up-and-up, regardless of what the girl’s age is, it’s a little disturbing. As of about a week ago, CheChe seems to have an infant/toddler in the house, things are supposed to be tough on the older daughter “since we lost her mother” and the signature under each post suggests he’s opposed to bottle-feeding. So what I want to know is, was the little one put on strained carrots and baby-mush before the mom kicked the bucket, or does this guy have a pair of man-boobs?

And regarding the older girl — how about a nice rented disc or two of SpongeBob SquarePants? I mean, for crying in da sink…California special election? Alito hearings? Sobbing her eyes out over the President leaving to visit another country? What a freakin’ drama queen. She’s going to make some poor sap into a real happy husband someday.

My pet gila monster and I are going to have a good cry over this now. Seeing the strength in my gila monster’s face helps me to get through.

Well, That Was Lame II

You can have a baby in nine months. And I guess in that amount of time you can also figure out Karl Rove is not going to be indicted after all.

“On June 12, 2006, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges against Karl Rove,” Rove’s lawyer, Robert Luskin, said in a statement.

The question of what would happen to Rove, one of Washington’s most powerful and polarizing figures, in the CIA case had been a major topic in Washington since Lewis Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on charges relating to the leak of a CIA covert operative’s name.

“We believe the special counsel’s decision should put an end to the baseless speculation about Mr. Rove’s conduct,” Luskin said.

Liberals, do you have any comment? Come to think of it, how did a Rove indictment ever matter one way or t’other?

Update: Hat tip to Best of the Web for this. It’s the “Five Stages of Grieving” being meticulously observed by real, live, left-wing ranting thread-poster-people about the Karl Rove letdown, over at the Rovian Conspiracy. Very well done.

Beltway Trouble

Let me state at the outset, my opinion that in the eyes of history, the “Intelligence About Iraq” imbroglio has irredeemably turned all soft and brown. President Bush’s legacy is in the process of being decided, but the legacy of said imbroglio is not. If he is remembered as a golden-boy, beneath a negligible tarnish, like FDR, history will separate him from the imbroglio. If he is trashed, like Ulysses Grant, history will fasten him to the imbroglio. The fecal qualities of the imbroglio have been decided, and chiseled in stone.

The preceding paragraph, appearances notwithstanding, is an indictment against history, not against the imbroglio. Very few things being advanced, articulated and remembered about the imbroglio, are true. To those who bother to study the details, the entire saga is a lesson about the fallibility of history. History has an ugly manufacturing process; it is written by a pinpoint-sized selection of elites, and often by elites who have a variety of different interests in making something go away.

And it seems to be the nature of politics, to make things go away that are in fact true, and enshrine false things high atop a dais of everlasting remembrance. According to the unpleasantnesses being brought to my attention, and at this point I see no reason to doubt them, this pertains in an ugly way to the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden. According to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Gen. Hayden has asserted quite a simplistic and half-assed version of events in the above-described imbroglio, on the floor of the United States Senate no less — promised in private to correct the record publicly, and then apparently welched. If what I’m reading is true.

As General Hayden would have known all too well, [Undersecretary of Defense Doug] Feith’s office has been an obsession of Senator [Carl] Levin [D-MI], who contends despite all evidence that mistakes on Iraq intelligence were all the fault of civilian appointees at the Pentagon. The truth, as a bipartisan report from his own committee attests, is that the CIA made most of the errors on its own.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Feith called General Hayden to object to his testimony. And, according to Mr. Feith, General Hayden was apologetic. He said he had not intended to say what he appeared to, and promised to issue a statement correcting the record. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl tells us he had a similar conversation with General Hayden, during which the CIA director promised a remedial letter that could be entered into the Congressional record. “He told us he did not intend those remarks to suggest Doug Feith or the Department of Defense did anything wrong, inaccurate or misleading. That is precisely what he told me,” says Mr. Kyl.

But the General’s subsequent effort, provided to us by Mr. Kyl, is no retraction or correction at all. It says only that his concern about bad intelligence methodology “is not confined to any specific program.” Both Mr. Feith and the Senator have asked Mr. Hayden to be more specific, but so far to no avail. Mr. Hayden also declined to comment for this editorial.

I can’t get too hopping mad at the politicians about the nature of politics. Politics has cast doubt on things that are true, and shone a favorable light of believability on things that are false, ever since the first time one man appointed another to represent him in something. This is just human nature; asked what happened, people like to report what is expected from them, as opposed to what really happened.

Nor am I particularly upset about the people-at-large like myself, being set up to misunderstand what kind of information is sloshing around in the intelligence community. That kind of stuff is classified for a reason; we aren’t supposed to understand everything.

What really bursts my buttons, is the kind of attention, or lack thereof, that is paid to how things like this actually work. How the mechanism actually functions, is the business of the country. If any of that should be obstructed from We, The People, there’s certainly no reason to obstruct same from the view of the legislators who are supposed to be overseeing it.

For Chrissakes. It’s an even-numbered year. We’re about to start a long hot summer of arguing over how the government should steal dimes and quarters from thirty-something apartment rats like myself, and spend it on free Viagra for wealthy, comfortable old farts with summer homes, swimming pools and Winnebagoes. And Al Gore’s bullshit about global warming. And stem cells, exit exams, minimum wage, and SUVs.

Meanwhile, gathering intelligence on bad guys who want to kill Americans, is one of the few things government is really supposed to do.

It appears that the truth is teetering on the brink of being discarded for all of the future foreseeable recorded history, and that a lie is about to be enshrined as the truth. Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats are all supposed to be uppity and cantankerous and grouchy over the fact that “mistakes were made,” so to speak — and after the dust has settled, there will be not one single rational, logical reason to expect things to turn out any different next time. The difference between good intelligence and bad intelligence, is PEOPLE DYING. Not just any people; the people we think about on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, some of whom willingly sign up for foot fungus, rotten underwear, months-at-a-time away from their families, and possible loss of life and limb, to make the world a better place. Better people than me. Something is busted that gets these people killed, and we’re not fixing it.

If Gen. Hayden is really telling two different versions of the story to two different sets of people, dancing back & forth depending on who he’s talking to — not, I’m given to understand, an unusual habit in the beltway — he needs to be fired yesterday. That’s assuming I have the story in front of me as it really happened. Which I hope is not the case.

But regardless of that, the time has probably come to let our delegates know we care about this stuff.

Thing I Know #89. Since biblical times, what we have come to call “news” has always been a curious hybrid. It blends whatever is written in the messenger’s scroll, with what the Emperor is ready to hear.

Showdown

On Friday, I wrote about the unfolding situation out in Philadelphia involving Joey Vento, 66, owner of Geno’s Steaks, one of the city’s most popular cheesesteak eateries. Mr. Vento has put up a little sign on the front of his shop that says when you’re ordering, please speak English. This appears to have become an issue in the neighborhood lately, as prospective patrons walk up and spew their nonsensical non-English syllables, expecting to get a hot sandwich. Actually I shouldn’t use the word “prospective,” as Mr. Vento says nobody has every been turned away over the policy, and nobody anywhere has taken the effort to contradict him. In point of fact, if you watch his interview from beginning to end, he seems to have a lot more open-mindedness and tolerance than a lot of the hard-left-wingers I know who hope to monopolize such positive human attributes.

Well, local busybody Rachel Lawton has announced that tonight or tomorrow, Geno’s Steaks is to be served with an official complaint for violating the city’s, um…oh, where is that article. Here it is. For violating the city’s “Fair Practices Ordinance.” The ordinance is supposed to prohibit discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing. And Lawton is the acting executive director of the city’s Commission on Human Relations.

Fair Practices Ordinance. Prohibits discrimination in public accommodations. That sounds pretty harmless, huh? Just remember this next time some anti-discrimination law comes up and your local busybody liberal demands to know how, oh pray tell how, could you vote against an anti-discrimination ordinance. Think of Joey Vento. Joey, and his little 8″x5″ or 11″x8�” or whatever it is, his little cardboard sign.

Can’t have that now. We have an ordinance.

Geno’s owner Joseph Vento posted two small signs at his shop in south Philadelphia proclaiming: “This is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING ‘PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH.'”

Lawton said that violates the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing. “It’s discouraging patronage by non-English speaking customers because of their national origin or ancestry,” Lawton said.

Vento, 66, whose grandparents struggled to learn English after arriving from Sicily in the 1920s, said Monday that he is not discriminating and has no intention of giving in. “I would say they would have to handcuff me and take me out because I’m not taking it down,” Vento said.

One more time, with feeling, all together now: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Does anyone with any authority anywhere give a rat’s ass what this amendment was originally intended to say anymore? I say Joey Vento should get a written apology from the Commission of Whateveritiz, or else big giant marble crosses should go up on every city hall and state supreme court, from sea to shining sea.

Watch this tomorrow morning…see what happens…

Reformed Leftists

Two years ago, by reading the Wall Street Journal, I expanded my pool of knowledge and thus my personal fortune.

I had to wait an additional four months for the elections to be over so I could collect on a friendly wager. I got a couple of cheeseburgers out of the deal from a Kerry-voter who was suffering from a bad case of False Consensus Effect and was sure that our current President would be a one-termer. He was sure it would be a landslide. “Nobody” — nobody he knew — would vote for President Bush.

What did I read to expand my horizons, and help to glean what was about to happen? Stuff like this; comments from people who voted for Al Gore in 2000, and had made up their mind by mid-summer 2004 that President Bush would get the nod for a second term. More than two or three; an impressive number, representing a silent but voting even-greater number.

I’m a Gore voter who’s long since moved through the center to the right after 9/11.

I suspect Bush will garner quite a few people who normally vote Democratic.

…having watched news clips of recent Al Gore speeches, I suspect that more than a few Gore voters feel a shiver go down their spines when they think of how close the Tennessee Nut Case came to serving as our commander in chief.

…we believe that the left, as epitomized by Gore, has gone off the deep end and can’t be trusted with the reins of power, especially during wartime.

Turning it around, could anyone possibly have voted for Bush, witnessed Gore’s subsequent meltdown and said, boy, I sure wish he were our president?

Exhibit B, courtesy of blogger Michael Lopez-Calderon, is his essay which he wrote in October 2001, “The Fall of My Leftist House of Mirrors.” It appeared some four years later in Front Page Magazine, which left the unfortunate impression, he indicates, that it took him all that time to come around. As you read his comments, you see he was instantly turned-off with disgust by the reaction of high-profile leftists to the attack itself, and his Journey To The Dark Side was mostly completed back then.

To write more would run the risk of putting words in his mouth, so I’ll let his overture speak for itself. You are strongly encouraged, here, to click it open and read the entire thing.

That crashing, piercing sound you hear is the fall of my Leftist House of Mirrors. A worldview that purported moral truths, cloaked itself in the language of arcane academia, venerated its doubtlessly dedicated, sincere intellectual stalwarts and activists � Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Benjamin Spock, Howard Zinn, Edward Said — and preyed upon alienated young idealists who like me were in search of a workable Utopia, proved a chimera of monumental proportions. That my Leftist House of Mirrors produced an illusion on such a massive scale is now evidenced by the reaction of the Left�s priestly class to the horrific Islamo-Fascist act of mass murder on September 11, 2001.

The Leftist response to that wickedness bordered on the anemic at best, collaboration with evil at worst. That what�s left of the Left would hesitate in condemning this monstrous act; that it would even countenance the rubbish of �chickens coming home to roost� or as Chomsky quipped, �a nasty response to U.S. nastiness around the world,� unequivocally betrays a hatred of the United States, democracy, indeed even Western civilization, that is as equal parts lethal as it is irrational.

It’s the oldest story in the world about philosophical blunders, and we all fall prey to it: An epiphany precedes an opinion, and he who holds the opinion thinks his opinion is the only one that can arise from any form of enlightenment — we are tempted to believe an epiphany can precede no other opinions. But if epiphanies were expected, there wouldn’t be anything epiphanic about them, would there?

This road is well-trod. You come to learn about pain and suffering in the world, you become liberal…you come to learn about other things, and you become what today we call “conservative.” Once there, few people ever go back again. What are those other things? Too many to mention here. The knowledge, for example, that there really doesn’t seem to be any ideology that embraces love, as liberalism is supposed to — it seems even the best-intentioned movements, subsist over the long term on a steady diet of resentment and jealousy. The knowledge of bad men doing evil things, determined to keep on doing them long after the bones of good men have crumbled into dust. The knowledge gained through life experience that when Capt. Jean-Luc Picard negotiates with the Tazmanian Devil, Taz always wins unless the exchange is scripted.

Essentially, that ill-will is contagious, and good-will far less so. Facts are facts, opinions are opinions, the two are not interchangable. Unfortunately, the nature of such ideas is that they cannot be convincingly explained to someone. If you don’t know them already, it takes a jolting life-experience for you to become aware of them. And of course, once that happens, you’ll never forget.

This Is Good VIII

This is as good an an explanation as any, although by no means an all-encompassing one, why Neal Boortz is listed in my sidebar. He gets a hat tip for this. You might want to watch the video linked below before chowing down on that roll of Mentos and following it up with the 44-oz. bucket o’ Pepsi.

Or not…

Source

Update: If you go there, you have got to follow the link on one of the other pages to here. Find out what happens when you really, really do drink Pepsi and pop Mentos. Not for the squeamish…

Outrage! II

Anyone else notice how difficult it has become to simply make a point, and have that point considered on its merits? Or, when someone else makes a point, to consider that point on its merits alone? Sure you can still do it, but not while remaining tuned in to the broader debate-at-large; somehow you need to wear earplugs. It seems distraction, consternation, theatrical indignation are more the order of the day.

In her new book, Ann Coulter has pointed out some of the 9/11 widows who would like to point out what a doddering dunderhead our current President is, and are using their widowed status to give some extra boost to that message, seem to be enjoying their newfound celebrity status a little too much. Many an attack has followed against Coulter none of which, to the best I can ascertain, have to do with the merits of what she said. NBC Anchor Brian Williams introduced a segment with,

“just when you think that it seems that there are no limits on anything, someone comes along and makes a comment that goes over the line � the line that is shared by just about everybody because some things are, it turns out, still sacred.”

The Hartford Courant intoned in an editorial that Coulter should apologize, leaving unmentioned exactly what might happen to anyone, Coulter included, should she fail to do so:

To make such cruel and tasteless statements offends the memory of all who died in the World Trade Center attacks. Republicans and Democrats across the country been quick to condemn the remarks. Ms. Coulter should apologize for her outrageously insensitive comments.

Clearly, there’s some kind of line that can be crossed, and to suppose that such a line remains static throughout the decades would be ludicrous. Yet if there’s some kind of process by which we get to vote on where that line is, I must be missing the registration forms and sample ballots. No, this line is for the elites to draw…in such a way as to serve the whims of the aristocracy.

In 21st-century America. Who’d have thunk it.

And now two assemblywomen in New Jersey, home state of the women so described in Coulter’s book, have called for a boycott. That’s right, a boycott.

Assemblywomen Call For Boycott Of New Coulter Book

Two state lawmakers are calling on New Jerseyans to boycott a book by conservative commentator Ann Coulter that calls some outspoken nine-eleven widows “The Witches of East Brunswick.”

Democratic Assemblywomen Joan Quigley and Linda Stender say Coulter’s characterizations and remarks are motivated by greed and her desire to sell books.

In “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” Coulter writes that a group of New Jersey widows whose husbands perished in the World Trade Center act “as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them.”

Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza have spent the years since the 2001 terror attacks supporting an independent commission to examine government failures. During the 2004 presidential race, they endorsed Democrat John Kerry.

This is exactly what I was writing about here and here. What do we have here, four 9/11 widows who happen to be Kerry supporters, or four Kerry supporters who happen to be 9/11 widows? Those are two manifestly different situations.

Some three thousand people were killed on September 11, 2001. It ought to be pretty damn easy to find someone who a) supported George W. Bush right up to and including 9/10/11; b) lost a close relative during the attacks; c) learned something in those attacks, or subsequent attacks, causing them to change their mind. That should be easy. I’m sure there’s someone like that somewhere.

Those who seek to proliferate the message, have chosen not to do that. Chosen not to do that. We are left wondering about my question: What’s the real motive? Could it be this is just an innovative way to spread the message?

Coulter has offered a sound theory as to why this choice was made: To make the designated victim bullet-proof. The women about whom Coulter was writing, and their supporters, seek a monologue in the disguise of a dialogue. They have something to say, and they want zero challenges, zero disagreement, zero discussion. So to promulgate the ideas, spokesmen are selected who bear stories of grief, and with them, auras of invincibility. The spokesmen speak, and in our “quasi-free-speech” society, anyone with any reputation to protect whatsoever, is for all practical purposes prohibited from saying anything in reply.

The theory makes sense. And now energy is spent to keep it from resonating. The New York Times — refusing to consider Coulter’s message on its merits — says “Without the total package, Ms. Coulter would be just one more nut living in Mom’s basement. You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading political writers of our age says something about the rest of us.” Leonard Pitts writing for my local newspaper The Sacramento Bee, says “The nation’s political discourse has never been as polite and decorous as we like to think…When, however, even widows become fair game for a viperous harridan with an ax to grind and books to sell, maybe decent people should wonder at the lines we have crossed and the type of nation we have become in the process.”

Ah…so “news” isn’t about telling me what’s going on in the world, now it’s about rapping me on the knuckles if I choose to learn of these events from the wrong people.

To the extent that the effort to silence Coulter involves the free exchange of ideas, I support the effort. I even support their right to boycott, to the extent it involves an exhortation to others to join the boycott. The thing of it is, and it’s a big thing: Logically, in order to support this, I must also support Ann Coulter’s right, and her ability, to say what she said. As well as the ability of others to hear what she has to say, should they so choose.

In other words, supporting Freedom of Speech up to, and including, the point where it actually leads to a reasoned discussion of ideas. And whether or not someone lost somebody close to them in the attacks, or in the war, or in anything else, does nothing to diminish this. If this crosses some kind of “line”…let me be the first to state that obvious. Lines have been crossed. Decorum has been lost. People have been made to feel bad to make other people feel good. Products have been sold, involving excruciatingly personal events that certain people might find offensive.

People have eaten bugs on television in order to get ratings. Couples have been sent to islands with good-looking studs and strumpets on said islands, so that temptation can split them up. The parents of our war casualties — the ones that are pro-war — have been ignored, methodically, while Cindy Sheehan preaches on her soapbox endlessly. We have consumed things that raise reasonable questions about what kind of society we really are. All this stuff is “line-crossing,” and it has been going on for a long time now. It’s a little late to be taking ourselves to the woodshed over things like this; if Ann Coulter has awakened somebody somewhere, I have to ask what kind of a nap they have been having.

So let her have her say. If this is disreputable talk, it is reflects on nobody except her. If she’s wrong, let her talk all the more freely, for this would be the best way to point out how wrong she is.

Yeah, that’s pretty radical. Pretty looney-tunes on my part. Heady stuff.

We could call it my nutty little “Freedom of speech is for everybody” idea.

I’m wondering, in fact, why anyone would disagree. Why use the phony outrage to duct-tape Ann Coulter’s mouth? Sure her voice is shrill, but the same is true of many other pundits, some of them even more prominent than Ann. Why boycott this? What are you hiding?

This Is Good VII

Hat tip to Rossputin for this. When sarcasm is used judiciously and effectively, sometimes the product that results is so just-plain-good you have to stand back in awe. No matter what your feelings are about unions, the preceding applies here. You’ve got to check it out.

Net Neutrality

The House of Representatives rejected the Net Neutrality rules; the floor vote roll call is here.

According to a consensus amongst the FARK community, or at least a rancorous portion thereof, this is supposed to kill our freedom. That would be the first time, in my recollection, that government regulation would add to our freedom, or a setback to that regulation would take it away. Struggling to think of a precedent that parallels Net Neutrality, the closest one that comes to mind is the FCC regulating television and radio stations and fining those stations for incidents of obscenity and indecency.

Interestingly, among the FARK user names protesting the defeat of Net Neutrality, insisting that we somehow need this regulation to preserve the freedoms we have, I recognize several that are known to me to have bristled at the forementioned FCC regulation. The question I have for those angsty souls should be obvious.

Sarbanes Oxley has worked out extremely well for us. If you follow the hyperlink in the previous sentence, you will see I’m being sarcastic. SOX was not entirely uncalled-for; SOX had an inspirational anecdote, that being the Enron mess. Now that SOX is here, perhaps it’s a fair assessment to state that we feel the laborious effects of the regulation, more keenly than the purifying effects of same.

So the Net Neutrality people are asking me to believe the following, as I understand it: Emerging freshly from tinkering with something that they could perhaps have argued was busted, and having made a thorough hash out of it, Congress is about to tinker with something nobody thinks is busted which is the “innernets.” We need new rules to keep what we’re keeping just fine & dandy, without the new rules.

The FAQ for the “Save The Internet” political lobbying group, refers to Net Neutrality as “the First Amendment of the Internet.” The question that naturally arises as a result of this, is, doesn’t the First Amendment already apply to the Internet? I have the impression that the most critical reason why the Internet is so universally loved, and there’s such across-the-board concern about saving it, is that the answer to the foregoing is yes. How then does this situation change when a new rule is drafted, and then not passed?

As is often the case, one would think it would be easy to get an answer to such an innocuous inquiry, and it is anything but.

Memo For File IV

Not sure what to make of this blog over here just yet, but it looks like something worth bookmarking. It’s well-written, well enough anyway, and the author has the same pet peeves about what we call “science” that I’ve been having. Possible worthy addition to the sidebar. He elaborates on his complaints here and here and here and here. And here too. Seems to be pretty organized about it.

I have come to be aware of a new logical fallacy being used with increasing regularity by the scientific community, and it’s getting even more frequent use with the release of Al Gore’s new movie. I have called this the Hundred Percent Fallacy but it would be more descriptive to call it something like a Fallacy of Faux Unanimity or some such. It is the love-child of the No True Scotsman fallacy and the False Consensus Effect.

It works like this.

1. Global warming is real and it is caused by humans.
2. One of the most persuasive foundations for #1, is that all scientists agree with it (False Consensus).
3. Response: Bob is a scientist, and he doesn’t agree with #1, so #2 is placed in doubt.
4. (No True Scotsman): Bob is not a real scientist, because he doesn’t agree with #1.
5. All scientists who similarly dissent from #1, are likewise eliminated from the pool, so the veracity of #2 is restored.

The Circular Logic fallacy also has strong influence here. #1 is supposed to be supported by #2, but instead it is used to support #5, which in turn supports #2, which supports #1. There is no one single genesis for the support sequence, no beginning and no end. It just goes in a circle.

That’s a problem that deprives the equation of the proof it is supposed to be providing. The much bigger problem, is that conceptually, a consensus has little or nothing to do with proving anything. The majority amongst a pool of concerned commentators is wrong, fairly often. This has always been the case. And even if it hasn’t, what we call “science” ought to be constructed to allow for this. By design, Science-By-Consensus doesn’t allow for such a thing and can’t allow for such a thing.

Update: I don’t want to lose this one to my old-age forgetfulness either. Looks interesting. Also a worthy potential sidebar addition. “Stilettos in the Sand.”

Update 6-10-06: This guy is listing me in the sidebar, so his site deserves nothing less than a serious looking-over. A pursuit which can’t receive the time and attention from me that it deserves, at the moment, but I’ll fix that shortly.

Crusading Against Absolutes

Joey Vento sells cheesesteak sandwiches in Philadelphia, but only to people who speak English. How ’bout that?

Vento, whose grandparents struggled to learn English after immigrating from Sicily in the 1920s, said his staff is glad to help non-native speakers order in English and no one has been turned away because of a language barrier.

“I don’t see much of a big deal about learning to say Cheez Whiz,” he told ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” on Friday.

He’s an absolutist. He says if you’re here in America, your loyalties should be to America, and to nowhere else. That’s a little bit too much absolutism for some people, including some goo-gooder on the city council. Way too much absolutism…but hey, what would you call “thou shalt take down thy sign if it isn’t politically correct”? What do you call that? What do you call some artificially-energized drive to clean up any and all 5″ x 8″ placards from a huge sprawling megalopolis like Philly, anything that some busybody council member might not like?

Granted, there are more than a few people think the sign is pretty terrible. One guy in the video clip you may be able to watch, thinks it’s “a little racist.” What a pinhead. What color is English may I ask?

A City Council member jumped into the debate over a sign at one of Philadelphia’s best-known cheesesteak joints that reads: “This Is AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING ‘SPEAK ENGLISH.'”

During the council’s meeting Thursday, Councilman Jim Kenney asked Geno’s owner Joseph Vento to take the small sign down. The English-only ordering sign has irritated some activists in the diverse neighborhood of South Philadelphia and drawn national attention.

“It’s such an iconic institution and business, one that is that visible for many of our residents, for the region and the world,” Kenney said.

Wouldn’t want those activists to be irritated. Asshole.

Watch the interview linked above. Go ahead, watch it. I didn’t see one racist thing slip past this fellow’s lips. Not ONE.

Why should he take down his sign? Go ahead, give me one well-thought out argument. Just one.

Hat tip to Malkin for this one.

Thing I Know #30. A lot of people who crusade against absolutes, employ absolutes quite frequently, especially while crusading against absolutes.

Adios

It has been brought to my attention that although I’ve made a handful of oh-by-the-way references to the passing of the late distinguished enemy of America Abu-Masoud Al-Zarqawi, I have not yet taken the time to say what my feelings are. So here’s a brief but profound tribute.

Zarqawi, you’re a vicious bastard, and I’m glad you’re dead.

Check out this clip from Hot Air. Hat tip to the Rottweiler.

Picard vs. The Tazmanian Devil

This blog, which nobody reads anyway, makes occasional and vague references to the contrast between the two famous starship captains James Tiberius Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard. Perhaps this requires some explanation.

Picard was designated as the successor to Kirk. This worked out great, commercially, not quite so well in the practice of developing the central message of Star Trek. One of the habits Picard had that was particularly irritating to “real” fans of Star Trek, like me, was his infernal habit of negotiating things. Of course, that is a starship captain’s job; it is the job of Star Trek to advance an agenda of talking problems out, preventing their descension into armed conflict. Kirk did this too. Star Trek, from Day One, supported a value system that involved finding common ground and preventing bloodshed over cultural conflicts.

My resentment toward the Bald One had to do with his proclivity for settling upon a strategy of diplomacy unilaterally. Beneath the hairless scalp, he would get an itch between his ears that a lowering-of-the-shields would be the only thing needed to get the discussions underway. In effect, a willingness to talk the differences out, was bound to be returned, boomerang-style, regardless of the alien culture encountered. If I lower the ship’s defense shield, there’s no way that nasty alien would fire on us. No way. What, are they nuts???

And of course it must work, because the Enterprise-D emerged intact every time.

Well for many among us, this didn’t fit in Star Trek lore. In reply to the “are they nuts” question, above, sometimes the answer is: Hell, yes. It’s the final frontier. We’re combing a galaxy; it’s a big thing; of course there’s nutty stuff in it. Kirk took this into account. When he negotiated, his hostiles weren’t so willing to negotiate (although, their command of the English language was quite remarkable) — and so a good chunk of the story had to do with how it became possible to negotiate. And when I say “a good chunk” I mean, pretty much, all of it. One minute for the situation to develop, one minute to beam to the planet’s surface, two minutes for the nameless guy in the red shirt to die hideously, and a minute-and-a-half at the very end for McCoy to make a smartass remark to Spock just before the credits rolled. It’s fair to say every second sandwiched in between, minus commercials, some 45 minutes or more, had to do with why, and how, the belligerent alients were persuaded to talk things out instead of vaporizing the Enterprise out of existence. Usually, the belligerents were transformed into diplomats because of some kind of mutually-assured destruction. The actual talks, were nothing. Zero minutes for those. The story has to do with how the talks came about.

In the Next Generation, the belligerent aliens began negotiating because they were inspired by Picard’s example.

What a bunch of crap that is.

Star Trek is about plunging into the final frontier, and meeting “strange, new worlds” with a method of problem-solving that works everywhere. In Kirk’s time that meant knowing when to hold’em and knowing when to fold’em. This resonates with grown-ups; that does work everywhere. In Picard’s time, the message was that willingness to negotiate works everywhere. It’s contagious. Sorry, that’s just not necessarily so.

Picard would be defeated handily by his opposite. That would be the Looney Tunes Tazmanian Devil, a creature that possesses no high-mindedness, no diplomacy, no sense of strategy, at all whatsoever. He’d swallow Picard whole and spit out the Starfleet logo gold communicator chest-pin and four rank pips, with a loud burp. Why? Because diplomacy is an exchange that can’t be started until both sides agree to it. This was realized in the old episodes with Kirk, but it’s lost in the newer ones with Picard.

Kirk’s way really would work everywhere in the galaxy. In fact, Kirk once actually did take on the Tazmanian Devil. It was a giant lizard-like creature and Kirk built a cannon out of bamboo and blew that sucker away. Kirk 1, Taz 0.

This is a lesson the Bush administration could do some thinking about in negotiating with that “I’m a dinner jacket” guy over in Iran. This is not getting any coverage at all, to speak of; it is terribly important; and it’s just not going well.

Dinner Jacket is Taz, and we’re Picard. All the willingness to negotiate is on our side. Dinner Jacket lives in a world of chest-beating, might-makes-right, etc. Essentially, we’re negotiating with him when he hasn’t agreed to the negotiation process. His message to us, from what I gather, is “you guys just stand there and keep on talking, I’m going to go enrich some uranium.”

Iran’s president said Thursday his regime is ready for talks over its nuclear capabilities, but he sent mixed signals on how much is open for negotiation and suggested Tehran has the upper hand in its showdown with the West.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated Iran’s position that uranium enrichment is an untouchable national right, a clear jab at the West two days after Iran received a package of economic and technological incentives to suspend the program.

But he also offered some signs of flexibility without specifically mentioning the proposal. In a speech at an industrial city, he said Iran would hold dialogue on “mutual concerns” with foreign powers � including the United States � if they took place “free from threats.”

Therein lies the problem with diplomacy. It is an exchange that places a premium value on refined strategy and positive results, but the diplomat with the least-refined strategy obtains the most positive results.

What’s that over there? It’s a pile of Tazmanian-Devil dung with four rank pips stuck in it.

New Theme

No, I still have my old theme. No new theme here. Chad, over at Pass The Ammo, has a new theme. Looks pretty good. Check it out.

“Kip’s Ma” Loses Her Job

In Atlas Shrugged there is a character called “Kip’s Ma.” Her real name is supposed to be Emma Chalmers, and she’s the mother of Kip Chalmers, a bureaucrat who is placed in a position of high influence because of his blandness and mediocrity. Kip Chalmers was a typical Ayn Rand villain, spazzing out at every little crisis, yelling in a high-pitched panic voice about “Must Ought Should Ought Must Must Must” stuff at the top of his lungs.

As a direct result of people like Kip Chalmers being in charge of things, a train tunnel collapses, flattening some massive number of people in what is referred to as the Taggart Tunnel Disaster. Among the flattened (and exploded and immolated and asphyxiated) deceased, is Kip. Kip is promptly forgotten, while his up-until-then-unmentioned mother is elevated to a God-like status in the bureaucracy of which Kip never could have dreamed. She starts talking, everyone else in the room stops in mid-sentence to hear what she has to say. And why shouldn’t they, her son was killed after all.

This doesn’t work out so hot, since the reason “Kip’s Ma” gets to run around deciding how everyone else is going to live, has little-to-nothing to do with her ideas being any good — it has to do with her son being killed. Long after the last mention of Kip Chalmers himself, and, I speculate, long after anyone would be able to remember a thing about him (nor has “Kip’s Ma” taken the time to mention anything about him), Ma hits on a novel idea: Let’s solve the wheat famine by forgetting about wheat. Wheat is a western innovation, after all, and it emerges that Kip’s Ma has a hostility to such things. Soybeans are the way to go. The orient is smarter than we are about some things, and this has to be one of those things.

The country switches to soy. Kip’s Ma lost her son, after all.

Well, soy has to be handled in a certain way. In this case, the beans were picked too soon. They are green when they’re off the vine, and rot before they are ever edible. Millions starve. Maybe they would have starved, anyway, if they were fed wheat instead of soy. But as things stand, they never had a shot.

Because Kip’s Ma lost a son, after all.

It’s the confluence of several significant events that threaten to cost “Kip’s Ma” — read that as an aggregate body consisting of Michael Berg, Cindy Sheehan, and others — her job. Zarqawi, the terrorist who seems to have personally sawed off the head of Michael Berg’s son Nick, while the victim was still alive, is now dead. The elder Berg thinks this is a sad thing, doubts that Zarqawi was responsible, and instead puts the blame on President Bush. To most Americans, that’s surreal.

Just as we’re trying to come to grips with Mr. Berg’s viewpoint, and probably spending vastly more energy trying to do so compared to what we would spend on the silly and unsustainable viewpoint of a lesser mortal — he lost his son, after all — Ann Coulter points out what privately, we all have known, but something on which publicly, we have kept our silence. The anti-war left selects spokespeople like Cindy Sheehan, who don’t necessarily know anything, but have been affected by personal tragedy. This is a tactic. It is done to intimidate anyone who may be opposed to the viewpoints of the bereaved, from speaking out against them. It may be fair, it may be unfair, but what it definitely is is an assault on truth and logic, for truth and logic are not being used to select the perspective that will carry the day.

Just as truth and logic weren’t used to select soybeans.

In fact, truth and logic have no place in the equation. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd famously opined that Cindy Sheehan’s “moral authority” is “absolute.” As Charles Krauthammer pointed out, this is disingenuous because it can’t be anything but: That class of parent which has lost a child in the war, is a class that encompasses thousands of bereaved instances, some of whom are in favor of the war. If absolute moral authority is conferred because of membership in this class, how can they all have absolute authority when they disagree?

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times claims that Sheehan’s “moral authority” on the war is “absolute.” This is obtuse. Sheehan’s diatribes against George Bush — “lying bastard”; “filth-spewer and warmonger”; “biggest terrorist in the world” — have no more moral standing than Joseph Kennedy’s vilification of Franklin Roosevelt. And if Sheehan speaks with absolute moral authority, then so does Diane Ibbotson — and the other mothers who have lost sons in Iraq yet continue to support the mission their sons died for and bitterly oppose Sheehan for discrediting it.

Undeterred by such logic, the anti-war left has sounded the call for an all-out-assault against Ann Coulter, and as is typical of anti-Coulter attacks, there is silence where one would expect to find a justification for the attack. Why are we supposed to get outraged against what she said? Of course I’m a doo doo head for asking and a variety of other nasty things; but what’s the answer to my question? As Kevin McCullouch pointed out this morning, it appears that what she said is a hundred percent true:

An interesting point: When the GOP invited widows of 9-11 to participate in their national convention, charges went up from the left of “pure political posturing.” Yet any observer of those who participated would be hard-pressed to know of a single critical thing they said about the president’s opponents. The presentation they made dealt with the need for America to remain strong in its stand against terrorism. Kerry’s name was never even invoked, and their involvement in the public debate ended that night.

The Jersey Girls, on the other hand, have consistently spoken out and advocated on behalf of leftist interests through the 9-11 commission’s findings to the operation of the global War on Terror, the elections of 2004, etc. In other words, they chose, or the liberal Democratic Party chose for them, to enter the fray, to don the gloves and to mix it up.

But what if they’re wrong? What if, even in as much pain as they have endured at the hands of terrorists, the substance of what they argue for is as loony as the day is long? Even if Cindy Sheehan lost her heroic son in the War on Terror, does that now mean that everything Cindy Sheehan says is correct?

Which is Ann’s point.

Ann’s criticism is legitimate. If liberals in America wish truly to have a debate on the issues that we all have strong emotions about, then stand and make the point, but don’t hide behind those who are ineffective, unskilled and often wrong in their views, simply because they’re victims.

And this is kind of along the lines of what I was pointing out yesterday: “Liberals in America” may desire to have a debate about policy, but they are not acting like they do. For one thing, if the debate should include — rather, if the debate should enshrine — those who have their opinions because of the loss of a loved one, let us see the issues advanced by those who have their opinions because of the loss of a loved one. What’s up with these lifetime, or virtual-lifetime, activists? A noisy advocate of the likes of Michael Berg or Cindy Sheehan, doesn’t fill the bill. If you’ve always been anti-war, and one day you lost your child to the war, then the death of the child didn’t change your mind and therefore had nothing to do with forming the opinion. There was no epiphany, no expansion of the horizons, no learning involved, just an intensifying of feeling, nothing more.

Even granting the premise that this status gives him some special authority to comment, and/or knowledge about what’s going on — and that’s an extravagant premise — this would have importance to the rest of us, if and only if Michael Berg’s opinion were somehow shaped by this tragic event. No compelling evidence that this is the case, has ever come to my attention…not once. In point of fact, of all the relatives of military and civilian casualities arising from this conflict, right back to September 11, 2001 — among those grieving relatives who are anti-war now, to the best I can determine, each and every single one of them were anti-war while their loved ones were still alive.

I’m sure there are exceptions to that somewhere. But I don’t know of any. More importantly, nobody’s taking the time to point such examples out to me. “Bob is against the war; Bob’s son was killed in the war.” The implication is that Bob knows more than I do — but that’s logically unsustainable, if somewhere you can’t find a “Bob” who was apathetic about the war…or in favor of the war…and he came to be anti-war after his son was killed. If you found someone like that, then he could talk about this broadened sense of perspective he had, and the things he came to learn as a result thereof, after this terrible tragedy in his family.

We’re witnessing a multi-flank assault that is truly devastating, as we are supposed to. But the multi-flank assault is not being inflicted on Ann Coulter, as the anti-war left intends, nor does the assaulting force have much to do with spicy emotions, as they intend. The assault is on the “Kip’s Ma” brigade and the assaulter is simple common sense.

I have doubts that the “Kip’s Ma” brigade can survive this assault. It could emerge unscratched from a single-front assault; this is what it is designed to do. But an offense from several directions, simultaneously, each broadside attack the product of simple common-sense questions, is bound to peel the support from the movement like the peeling from a banana. Well, all the support save for what is most fanatical. This is the Achilles’ Heel of “accuse the accuser” defenses: You have to have a target to do any accusing at all, so this defense is inextricably intertwined with the single-front assault it is designed to counterattack.

That isn’t what’s happening anymore. The “Kip’s Ma” regime is about to be toppled.

This is a good thing. We never had a good prognosis for surviving them, any more than the starving people in Atlas Shrugged could hope to survive “Kip’s Ma” and her soybean diet.

This Is Good VI

Oh man, you have got to see this (language is SO unacceptable for a family audience and/or work). I told The One For Whom My Affection Is Unlimited that it reminded me of us. She had some trouble seeing herself in it…but in comparing the little irascible feline creature to myself, she had no problem with that parallel whatsoever.

Hat tip to Boortz, who identified strongly with the sock-puppet creature as well.

Grief Doesn’t Change A Mind

Regarding Michael Berg: I’m about to say something terribly callous. Here goes.

That he is the father of Nick Berg, who was so brutally executed on television, matters not one bit. Not insofar as taking a measure of what his opinion is in the war, and what exactly his opinion means.

I do not mean, by this, that he isn’t suffering from terrible grief over what happened to his son. Nor do I mean that I don’t personally care about his family. What I mean to say is, that as far as his opinions and how they are relevant to the public issues that arise from the current conflict, his status as the father of a fatality matters not one bit.

Even granting the premise that this status gives him some special authority to comment, and/or knowledge about what’s going on — and that’s an extravagant premise — this would have importance to the rest of us, if and only if Michael Berg’s opinion were somehow shaped by this tragic event. No compelling evidence that this is the case, has ever come to my attention…not once. In point of fact, of all the relatives of military and civilian casualities arising from this conflict, right back to September 11, 2001 — among those grieving relatives who are anti-war now, to the best I can determine, each and every single one of them were anti-war while their loved ones were still alive.

I’m sure there are exceptions to that somewhere. But I don’t know of any. More importantly, nobody’s taking the time to point such examples out to me. “Bob is against the war; Bob’s son was killed in the war.” The implication is that Bob knows more than I do — but that’s logically unsustainable, if somewhere you can’t find a “Bob” who was apathetic about the war…or in favor of the war…and he came to be anti-war after his son was killed. If you found someone like that, then he could talk about this broadened sense of perspective he had, and the things he came to learn as a result thereof, after this terrible tragedy in his family.

But I don’t get to hear about people like that. I get to hear about Michael Berg types and Cindy Sheehan types. People who, to the best I can determine, are anti-war activists because every day for years, they have rolled out of bed wanting to be just that — and one terrible day, they became parents of war casualties. Therefore, they became celebrities in a movement wherein they were previously just “movers” of the movement.

It would be oh so much more powerful to find me a parent of a war casualty who joined the anti-war movement as a result. I’m sure such people are out there. But the anti-war folks don’t think it’s important to tell me about them.

In the Coulter video clip I referenced just a few minutes ago, the author presents a theory: Advocates like this are presented by the anti-war movement because in so doing, the movement intimidates their opposition from engaging those advocates. Which raises the question about whether there’s anything to be engaged.

Michael Berg doesn’t think Zarqawi killed his son. At least he says he doesn’t. Is there any compelling evidence to be presented that would persuade me to think Zarqawi was innocent and President Bush is guilty? If there is, then Berg isn’t acting like that’s the case.

Personally, I don’t think Michael Berg has a single opinion, none whatsoever, that he wouldn’t have if Nick Berg was a complete stranger to him instead of his son. Grief, so far as I can determine, doesn’t change a mind. It may intensify an opinion already held, but it doesn’t show any sign of actually changing what that opinion is.

The bereaved-parent status of people like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Berg, therefore, is logically irrelevant to the discussion at hand. There, I said it. It’s true.

Gagged

My blogger friend Devil Dog wants to know if there’s a problem with Blogger. Hell yeah I’d say so. Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is dead. Michael Berg, father of Zarqawi murder victim Nick Berg, thinks President Bush is more to blame for his son’s death than Zarqawi. Fox News anchor E.D. Hill doesn’t know what to make of this and frankly, neither do I. Meanwhile, Ann Coulter says, regarding Bush-bashing anti-war 9/11 widows, “I’ve never seen people enjoy their husbands’ deaths so much.” And Matt Lauer doesn’t know what to make of that. Meanwhile, I don’t know what to make of Lauer. His interview subjects aren’t finished answering one of his questions, and he’s already interrupting them with the next question, this proving that no dialog whatsoever is really taking place. Why would you watch this?

Through all these things, each one worthy of comment, Blogger is down hard.

Suggestion: If I were an anti-war blogger, instead of a blogger who believes the Iraq liberation was the right thing that came far too late, Blogger’s various technical issues would cause me to be “muzzled” or “gagged.” Of course I would think this was a conspiracy. In fact, I’d be honor-bound to say so. No such thing as a coincidence, after all. I’d be in dire danger of being kicked out of the “Liberal Paranoid Anti-War Whiny Twit” club, if I failed to articulate the latest conspiracy theory, and show signs of believing it. My dissent is being silenced! It’s probably a conspiracy straight from the office of Karl Rove!

As it is, I know sometimes systems go crash and stop working. If this is something other than a coincidence, it probably has to do with the increased traffic being put on the system by Zarqawi’s meeting with the 72 virgins.

Anyway, it’s good to be back. Glad to see you all here.

The Most Dangerous Generation

Gee, I don’t know if I agree with this MSNBC article…

Too old to drive?
Baby boomers are politically powerful and confident of their abilities, and they prize their mobility. And they�re about to become the biggest threat on the highway.
By Debora Vrana

Think our roads already resemble a survivalist obstacle course? Get ready for 2025, when an estimated 40 million baby boomers will clog the left lanes of America, blinkers flashing, one foot trembling over the brake.

Though motorists older than 70 drive far less frequently than other age groups, they already account for an outsize proportion of fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The death rate per mile traveled for drivers over 85 is four times that of the 30-59 age group. The only group more dangerous than senior citizens is teen-agers. Senior drivers have special trouble judging speed and distances, which causes an inordinate number of rear-end and left-hand-turn accidents.

I mean, the baby boomers are definitely gonna be hangin’ around. The actuarial tables with send the age of average mortality sky-high in order to accommodate their longer life spans, and my money says the subjects of said tables will outlive even that. There will be few exceptions, so the most-populous age bracket will remain ever thus, even as it turns old & gray, saturated with centenarians. Through it all, they will nurture and fester that sense of self-entitlement for which they have become famous. Take their licenses away? Don’t dare even think of it.

But if the danger factor involving elderly drivers of the future is open to speculation, then the nature of articles portending certain doom is equally open. Such articles, including ones like this one, represent a natural product of our increased standard of living. It seems we always need something about which to worry. Said standard of living is bound to increase over time, so articles like this are bound to become more popular and more plentiful. As far as the danger itself, I have little concern. People will adapt. If it gets really bad, sidewalks adjacent to asphalt will become a thing of the past.

Til Death Do Us Part, I Betcha

New website gives you a way to place bets on how long your pal’s new marriage will last. Link goes to article about the website, not the website itself. Sorry.

Alongside their picture is a brief synopsis about them and the options for your prediction: barely past the altar, one year, five years, eight years, 15 years or happily ever after.

The site logs the number of votes on each partnership and then lists percentages on whether or not the couple will get divorced.

Thousands are logging on to the site to take part.

If you’ve a taste for gambling like this, a recently-married friend or acquaintance, and some money to put where your mouth is, go to town, man.

Francine Lost

Francine Busby, who was discussed here yesterday morning in context of her notorious “you don’t need papers for voting” statement, has lost the race to fill the Cunningham seat in the House of Representatives.

Guess she didn’t get enough help.

As I said, there is some powerful evidence that the Democratic party is counting on illegal aliens to vote, and sure as hell will allow illegal aliens to vote, even push illegal aliens to vote — but this is not that evidence. Frankly, some very high-profile conservatives have recently lost some of the respect they had earned, in my eyes, by jumping all over this thing. Now that Francine Busby is a losing candidate, nothing more, maybe this will go away.

Still, it’s worth noting that until Thursday night when she made the comment, Busby was neck-and-neck with her challenger. That might indicate how excited voters are about the turnstyle-hoppers being allowed to influence our elections. There is value in this, even if Congress is bound to ignore it.

Unintended Consequences II

Jon Stossel takes on the Americans with Disabilities Act. A must-read, especially for those delusional souls in our midst who tend to be easily persuaded that some of our most insidious hobgoblins can be simply legislated away:

Complicated laws like the ADA eventually hurt the people they were meant to help. The ADA has led many employers to avoid the disabled. One poll found that since the ADA was passed, the percentage of disabled men who were employed dropped. “Once you hire them, you can never fire them. They are lawsuit bombs,” one employer said. “So we just tell them the job has been filled.”

Stossel’s interview with Gilbert Casellas, President Clinton’s head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is absolutely priceless.

There are many more laws just like this, wherein a problem is identified, a law is passed, and the problem hangs around or gets worse as a result of the new law. If government was a business and the law was a project, the project would be put on probation and eventually cancelled. No cow would be too sacred for the slaughter. In fact, in business I have never been privileged to lay eyes on the metaphorical Sacred Cow. They give up the milk, or else they give up the beef.

But laws hang around. Forever; with very few exceptions.

Update: Walter Williams pushes Stossel’s new book, “Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity,” with some tantalizing tidbits. Interesting stuff.

Red Cross Evacuated After Bomb Threat

Yesterday morning I was kibitzing about Theon Johnson, Katrina survivor, who is subsisting on a steady stream of Halloween 5, Gothika, “Thrill Me” marathon, and donated food while he waits for an anticipated cash settlement of $1,200 from FEMA over and above what the agency has paid for his hotel. The hotel room goes unpaid now, but he can’t be kicked out because of New York squatter’s laws. He thinks FEMA should give him more money. No mention of why. No mention of any attempt to find work, in fact, his routine according to the article is one of showering, going to bed, showering, going to bed, and beating his meat to Halle Berry.

Well, since Johnson is a male, at least he’s probably not the Katrina survivor who phoned in a bomb threat to the Red Cross in Savannah, Georgia.

A bomb threat has put some Savannah Red Cross employees on edge. Police say an angry woman called in Saturday and told employees she was a Hurricane Katrina victim. She was upset that the Red Cross had done nothing for her and said there was a bomb in the building.

I really don’t know from the article what “done nothing for her” means. I would assume it has something to do with not paying for hotels anymore. The hurricane’s been gone for awhile now, and I find it a tad difficult to conclude she’s stranded on a rooftop somewhere, neck-deep in spoiled water and feces, phoning in bomb threats.

One of the most persuasive things “conservatives” say to promote their cause over the cause of “liberals,” is that sure people need help but the private sector is in a better position to provide it than government. To galvanize this point, they often mention that the results of government assistance, compared to the results of private-sector charities and other efforts, are…bass-ackward. They’re slow, they don’t work, in many cases they achieve the direct opposite of what they’re intended to achieve, and they promote a spirit of complacency, selfishness and badwill. Compared to that, private charities police their own residual samplings of graft wherever they may occur, so that such graft is checked. Government may not be synonymous with graft, but it is not renowned for keeping it in check. Not only that, but private charities get more bang for the buck. It is not in the nature of private charity, to put one guy in a hotel by the JFK airport for months at a time so he can watch Halle Berry movies all day and night, smoke and drink out his ass, and make petulant demands for more cash. Because the beneficiaries of private charity are encouraged to help themselves in order to qualify for the funds, the charities end up promoting goodwill instead of badwill.

Some people like the public-sector approach better than the private-sector approach. I’m not altogether sure why this is. In my four decades on the planet, I have never heard or seen evidence of the above points being deconstructed or addressed, one-by-one, by the public-sector-yes-private-sector-no folks. The argument that comes back, instead, is limited to simple “we-must” type stuff; something about “the Christian thing to do”; all theory, no practice. Nothing to persuade me, not adequately anyway, to reconsider my viewpoints on the less desirable results of government assistance.

Kind of interesting. You’d think there would have been something by now. Instead, all we see are bomb threats, and a bunch of bums chocking their chickens in two hundred dollar hotel rooms to endless dreck from the boob tube, while hotel managers struggle in futility to obtain a legal eviction.

I supported the Red Cross during the Katrina crisis, and I’m glad I did. To the best of my knowledge, they did an exemplary job helping the people who really needed the help, compared to FEMA. I wonder what the woman’s complaint was. My gut feel is if I were to find out, I’d be less than impressed.

Supporting Francine

Back in March, I came to the defense of some half-wit senator in Canada who indulged in some kind of half-wit change-the-subject type of attack on American policy and on President Bush, a change-of-subject that was completely unwarranted and, in the context of what she was being asked, unneeded on her part. She was being asked by a concerned Minnesota family about seal-hunting, and instead of replying the way a rational, red-blooded earthling would reply — “I’m in the Canadian Senate, we don’t decide that stuff” — she went on a tear about the United States foreign policy. A family in Minnesota, which went blue in the last election, has about as much to do with the Bush administration’s foreign policy as a Canadian senator has to do with seal hunting, so she answered air-headed goo-gooderness with more of the same.

My defense of her was that this was no accident. She was making a subtle comment.

I don’t really believe that’s the case; I was being sarcastic.

Well, this time there’s not so much irony here.

Democratic candidate for Congress Francine Busby was asked Thursday night about volunteer efforts in her campaign. She was making a speech to a Latino group, and toward the end of the session a man asked how he could help when he didn’t have papers. After the question was translated into English for her, she replied:

Everybody can help, yeah, absolutely, you can all help. You don’t need papers for voting, you don’t need to be a registered voter to help.

Power Line has more context & comment, and an audio clip. Washington Post has more.

Bottom-lining it real quick: Sorry, conservatives, I’m having a real tough time hopping on this bandwagon. Yes, Democrats have a vested interest in getting illegal aliens to vote, and yes from time to time it becomes demonstrable that they have this interest, and take aggressive action in pursuing it. But this is not the smoking gun.

Or what I should say is it would be the smoking gun, if and only if you proceed from the premise that the only way to “help” with a campaign is to personally vote for the candidate promoted by that campaign. I can’t sign on to that. Looking over the whole exchange, as much of it as I can get ahold of, it seems likely the subject was all the other stuff that has to be coordinated: The canvassing, the envelope-stuffing, the copy-making, all that jazz.

Does it look fishy that you don’t need voting papers to help with that? In my opinion, yes it does. Should it be allowed? Probably not. Is this evidence that Democrats want illegal aliens to vote? Honestly, no…not in the slightest.

They do, though. And I’m sure the evidence is out there. Wait for it. Jumping at stupid stuff like this, is the equivalent of lowering the conservative baseline to the level of the Jason Leopold and Truthout folks — it’s exactly the same practice. You’re frustrated that nobody ever gets nailed on this stuff, so you jump on the anecdote that is only marginally compelling and is logically unsustainable; the appearance you give, is that you aren’t personally invested in the premise that stronger evidence is out there.

Well, I am so personally invested. Democrats will get popped on something sooner or later, and that they’ll get popped this year, seems all-but-assured. I’ll even lay better-than-even odds that Busby will be among the ones popped. I just don’t think it has happened, here, and attempts to exploit this particular event will ultimately backfire. Throw that fish back, get some better bait, and confine your fishing to the posted limits.

Update: Rush has some interesting things to say about this. Where he’s essentially going with this, it seems, is that there is a perception out there that Francine Busby is going to try to win this thing on the strength of the illegal vote. As I said above, my opinion about what’s going on here, is consistent with this perception, although I dsagree with using her notorious quote as a foundation for drawing this.

She’s out there saying she misspoke. She says that she didn’t mean what she was trying to say out there, but she said it. The latest poll on this from Taegan Goddard‘s website is that Bilbray has now moved ahead by a couple points, and this appears to be one of the reasons. This is the final poll before the special election tomorrow for California 50. Survey USA finds that Brian Bilbray has a two-point lead over Busby 47 to 45%. The previous poll survey USA took had both candidates tied…When she says what she meant to say was, “You don’t have to vote for me to help. You can do a lot of things besides vote for me, and I just misspoke,” so she’s trying to slither out of that. But it’s too late. It’s out there, and on the weekend before the election…Remember, the Democrats are already setting this up for her to lose by saying, “She’s going to win anyway. I mean, we win anyway if we’re this close in this Republican a district,” and they did this before this gaffe.

Interesting. Hey I have a radical idea. This will fix the whole problem, and I can’t think of a single reason not to do it. My idea is exactly one word long: NO.

We go back and make Busby’s answer NO. What she meant when she used the word “help,” doesn’t matter. Make it so the answer is NO. If that’s not the correct answer, pass whatever federal laws we have to pass, to make it the right answer. No, you may not stuff envelopes. You may not answer phones. You may not go door-to-door on our behalf. You may not erect yard signs. You have to have voting papers to do any of that stuff, to even think about doing it. If you can’t prove you’re legally here, then you can’t do squat.

Now, what is the best possible argument for opposing that? We have bazillions of real, live, registered, legitimate voters who don’t have the slightest clue what to do in the voting booth and have little-to-no interest in finding out. People on both sides, for the most part, will agree with that. Can we not all sign up to the idea that it is a situation ripe for abuse, when people who aren’t legally allowed to vote, but are passionate about one candidate or another — are allowed to, in some way, “help” the legitimate-but-apathetic voters vote a certain way? Can we not all agree that something should be done about this before something bad happens? Regardless of your ideology or your priorities, how can you disagree with that?

What are you gonna say — these are law abiding people (after they hop the turnstyle) who want to make a better life for themselves and their children by coming here and stuffing envelopes as a volunteer?

Go ahead. Make the argument. I’d love to see that.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IX

Quoth Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times:

If you examine the assumptions underlying speeches by professors, media grandees, etc., it’s hard not to agree with the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, that these days America can only fight Vietnam, over and over: Every war is “supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal.” That’s how the nation demonstrates its “moral virtue” — i.e., its parochial self-absorption.

Last week, Cindy Sheehan said in Melbourne that “Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by the war machine in my country.” This week, Bobby’s son, Robert Kennedy Jr., said in Rolling Stone that Bush stole the 2004 election. Next week, it’ll be something else.

But there is more pain and more truth about America in those seven words of Martin Terrazas. A superpower that wallows in paranoia and glorifies self-loathing cannot endure and doesn’t deserve to.

This is the end of the editorial, the last three paragraphs. To find out what “those seven words of Martin Terrazas” are and what they mean, you have to read the rest. Cool the way I did that, huh?

Gee, That Worked Out Well

Every now and then, you’ll hear of one of our society’s more ambitious and progressive social programs defended with anecdotes involving people who’ve worked hard all their lives, who are down on their luck, in trouble through no fault of their own, wanting a hand up not a hand out.

That such people really do exist, is all the more reason to get a case of acid reflux over the story of Theon Johnson. The New Yorker article that describes his tale of…whatever you wanna call it…reads like some bizarre piece of fiction, written between one and four in the morning, by a balding, highly disgruntled conservative-libertarian “gummint’s got no business building fire halls & sidewalks” type. But it isn’t fiction. It’s true.

A Very Late Checkout
New York�s last Katrina evacuees prepare to depart (under duress) from the JFK Airport Holiday Inn.

This winter, FEMA put up over 300 Hurricane Katrina evacuees in New York City hotels. Almost all of them have gone back to their lives, their jobs. But not Theon Johnson. He�s currently sprawled out watching Halloween 5 on one of the two full-size beds in his room at the JFK Airport Holiday Inn. He is one of four evacuees still living in a hotel in the city.

The others left in February and March, when, after spending more than $500 million, FEMA stopped paying for hotel rooms housing some 40,000 evacuees across the country. That left many scrambling for places to live. But thanks to the city�s squatters-rights law, evacuees here were safe. Their rooms weren�t paid for, but since they�d been in them for more than 30 days, the hotels couldn�t just kick them out. Only a judge�s order could evict them.

And Johnson, 49, isn�t that motivated to leave. For one thing, AMC�s in the middle of its “Thrill Me” marathon. Next up, Gothika. “Halle Berry,” he says with lazy lust. These days he�s usually up all night�it�s hard to sleep on an empty stomach. When he has to, he�ll go outside and beg for change, but he doesn�t really like that too much. Most days he just showers and gets back in bed, showers and gets back in bed. Once a week he and another evacuee, a diabetic named Larry, walk to a church off the Van Wyck and get canned goods. When Johnson�s caseworker, Sharon, comes around, she gives him some bus passes and maybe a few bucks, but she�s getting frustrated. “They sit around on their butts watching TV. There�s only but so much I can do if they�re not willing to help themselves.”

After being flown here for free back in September, Johnson�s been at the Holiday Inn since Super Bowl Sunday. On April 21, the hotel served Johnson with three notices of occupancy termination, saying that it would begin court proceedings if he wasn�t out by May 9. He wasn�t, so it did. If the court boots him, Johnson could end up in one of the city�s homeless shelters. He�s been broke for over a month now. FEMA sent him $9,000 in housing aid, but he spent it all on booze, cigarettes, some clothes, and food�partying, mostly. “I spent my money just the way I wanted, and I think [FEMA] should send me some more,” he says. But it won�t. Johnson�s caseworker says fema offered to buy him a ticket home to New Orleans in February, but he didn�t take it. FEMA won�t now. So he�s stuck, at least until the Holiday Inn pays him to leave.

Attorneys with the Legal Aid Society have been negotiating a buyout deal for Johnson and the remaining evacuees, and expect a settlement�he heard about $1,200�imminently. He says he�ll use the money to get a room for a few nights and have some fun before flying back to his little house in New Orleans� Third Ward. But for now, Gothika�s on. “Halle Berry,” Johnson says. “Halle…Berry.”

Holiday Inn. New York City. JFK Airport. The “innernets” tell me, at this date, my “discount” rate for a non-smoking with two double beds is $198 and my “best flexible” rate is $209. (I can’t find a quote for two full beds so I assume it’s the same.) One half of this is $104.50; a third of it would be $69.67. I’ve stayed in some really nice hotel rooms for seventy clams. Actually, I’ve done it and felt terrible about doing it. More than once, I’ve drifted off to sleep thinking I should have been spending $50 or less, after all, I’m just sleeping here.

I would presume the White House and the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA would love to find a few more ways to reassure us that the next natural disaster will be handled better. I would presume Congress would like to find a few ways to provide better oversight to the process. And FEMA, I would presume, would like to find some ways to make the process less embarrassing, and a little cheaper. Furthermore, it is abundantly clear to me, Democrats would like to find some issues for this year’s midterm elections, something along the lines of the whole fiscal responsibility angle.

To all of the above…hello…hello?

I wonder how many of the forementioned hard-working people down on their luck, would just love to have a Motel 6 out in Oklahoma somewhere, provided by a compassionate government for a fraction of the price of a Holiday Inn in New York City. With Gothika playing on the boob tube.

It bears repeating. Irresponsibility is not compassion. It just isn’t.